Alison Smithson (22 June 1928 – 14 August 1993) and Peter Smithson (18 September 1923 – 3 March 2003) were Englisharchitects that together formed an architectural partnership, and are often associated with the New Brutalism (especially in architectural and urban theory).[1][2]

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Peter Smithson studied architecture at the University of Durham between 1939 and 1948, along with a programme in the Department of Town Planning, also at Durham, between 1946 and 1948. Alison studied architecture at the same university between 1944 and 1949. [3]

Among their early contributions were streets in the sky in which traffic and pedestrian circulation were rigorously separated, a theme popular in the 1960s. They were members of the Independent Group participating in the 1953 Parallel of Life and Art exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and This Is Tomorrow in 1956. Throughout their career they published their work energetically, including their several unbuilt schemes, giving them a profile, at least among other architects, out of proportion to their relatively modest output.

His teaching activity included the participation for many years at the ILAUD workshops together with fellow architect Giancarlo De Carlo.

Buildings at the University of Bath, including the School of Architecture and Building Engineering (1988)

The last project the Cantilever-Chair Museum of the Bauhaus design company TECTA in Lauenfoerde, Germany

Robin Hood Gardens was a project under construction when B. S. Johnson made a short film about the couple for the BBC, The Smithsons on Housing (1970). Sukhdev Sandhu, in a blog entry for the London Telegraph website wrote that "they drone in self-pitying fashion about vandals and local naysayers to such an extent that any traces of visionary utopianism are extinguished."[4] The finished flats suffered from high costs associated with the system selected and high levels of crime, all of which undermined the modernist vision of streets in the sky and the Smithsons' architectural reputation.[5]

They would go on to design several buildings at Bath, while relying mainly on private overseas commissions and Peter Smithson’s writing and teaching (he was a visiting professor at Bath from 1978 to 1990, and also a unit master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture).